1. Field
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to business intelligence (BI) systems and financial analysis systems. More specifically, embodiments of the present invention provide for one or more of (i) Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) taxonomy mapping (i.e., mapping extension taxonomy elements to a standard base taxonomy to achieve consistency and comparability in a diverse reporting environment) and (ii) building of a comprehensive XBRL data flow (e.g., using XBRL to aggregate information from multiple sources and push summary information into an XBRL document).
2. Description of Related Art
The XBRL standard provides a framework to categorize information, but also provides a great deal of flexibility for XBRL user within this framework. The specific rules of how information should be reported are the responsibility of the organization requesting the XBRL documents. For example, the FDIC requires member banks to submit XBRL Instance Documents that use the FDIC taxonomy, but banks also must follow specific rules in presenting information within instance documents.
The SEC takes a completely different approach than the FDIC. Since XBRL documents are to be consumed not just by the SEC, but also the investing public, the SEC (at least for now) gives filing companies a great deal of latitude to present information in such a way that best describes the unique characteristics of each company. Although the SEC does require filing companies to use a standard taxonomy—such as US Generally Accepted Accounting Principles for Commercial and Industrial companies (US GAAP CI)—they also allow those companies to create an extension taxonomy which has information not contained in the base taxonomy. An extension may contain completely new elements, or simply a different presentation than the base taxonomy. For example, an XBRL taxonomy may specify that an account called “Cash” appear higher in a Balance Sheet than an account called “Investments”; a filing company may want to reverse this presentation, and to do so would require an extended taxonomy. In addition, some XBRL tagging software products actually encourage filers to create large groups of elements outside of the base taxonomy—even when there is very little difference between the extended elements and base taxonomy.
Although extension taxonomies give companies an effective way to present information in a totally customized way, this flexibility makes comparisons between companies extremely difficult. And comparisons are crucial to regulators, investors, and other consumers of XBRL data, since comparing a company's financial results to industry groups, or to trends, averages, indexes, and various mathematical and statistical formulas, is the most fundamental way to evaluate a company's performance and value. One of the key issues decision makers in corporations face today is finding out how the business is doing, planning for the future, measuring performance against plan, being able to determine when and how a plan might need to be changed in response to internal and external events and ensuring that the organization meets regulatory requirements. This requires that reports and other financial applications are able to work with data from more than one system and the systems of more than one sub-entity (division, country office, etc.).